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Good OP, much better than my abandoned negative OP. Dont think Wiz is going to care for the title though. They're really trying to distance them selves from that (and it was already the title of the first stellaris thread)
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Jan 20, 2017 17:21
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14 |
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Chuck Buried Treasure posted:One thing thing I'm not clear on: is authoritarian vs. egalitarian just a find-and-replace rename of collectivism vs. individualism or a full-on reworking of the ethics? And either way, are our space capitalist trading empires still going to be based on the egalitarian ethos because that seems like a weird fit. The ethos system is so close to good, it's great at making a bunch of types of empires but has some huge missing types. Currently it's really easy to make all sorts of space monarchies from god-kings to benevolent enlightened monarches. It's really easy to make a corporate dystopia oligarchy, with caste-system that's going to perfectly model a society with a huge class divide between the mega-rich and their wage-slaves. All sorts of generic dictatorships are easy to model too. Typical capitalist/liberal democracy and social-democracy have their bases covered more or less. What's missing is any sort of communal system. Both the terrifying hive-mind sort of communal society due mostly to genetics, or the utopian democratic-communism style due to economics/government. I don't know if we just need a few more government types or some sort of "social values" pick or something. Just wanna have a space society without class and with democratic ownership and control of production man.
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Jan 20, 2017 18:34
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I'd just be happy with a title that doesn't make the paradox staff cringe and shed a single tear of regret every time they read it.
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Jan 20, 2017 18:55
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Yeah, I'd love to see more race picks the tie into ethos/culture/government/mechanics. Like have hive-mind an actual biological trait that locks their pops to a certain smaller window of ethos and some in-game mechanical changes. Have it so they basically can't deal with non-hive pops or have to enslave them, while when conquered will never assimilate in any way. Think about trying to conquer and integrate the bugs from starship troopers or tyranids or something. Could even have 2 levels of it, one for a limited hive like some insect society where there are still individuals but they're simply biologically extremely communal and under the influence of pheromones or what ever, and then a 2nd level that's a straight up hive-mind like tyranids. No individuals, entire race functions as one. No factions, no ethos drift, no happiness, and pops fight to the end and can not be conquered. You could also have a lithovore traits that skips the entire food system, having them eat minerals instead and treating all planets as their ideal. Let's get some sillicoids. Or weird energy creatures that skip food and eat energy instead, could be interesting. Just want to see more traits that actually change the mechanics, more asymmetry.
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Jan 20, 2017 19:54
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I'm really really curious how they'd do orbitals. I'd love to see them as full fledged upgradable colonies that can grow out of mining stations. So you start with a mining/science station, upgrade it to the point that it can fit a single pop who then works the resource at a bonus but now requires food and the stuff that goes along with being a pop. Global food would obviously help this. Just like upgrading starbases you could upgrade orbital habs as you upgrade them with slots. This would keep space resources competitive in the long term, and be rad as hell because planets are loving lame space should be 100% orbitals. Really I'd love for planet and orbital management just to be merged into system management. Planets and orbitals just add up together for the system's pop cap.
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Jan 20, 2017 23:02
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Good designs help, but it's mostly just having a bigger doom stack than the enemy and winning a single grand battle that destroys the entire enemy fleet at the very start of the war, then spending years mindlessly building up warscore while the enemy has no ability to recover but your will to continue playing the game goes down with every planet you have to tediously invade. You get this bigger fleet by having a bigger economy than your enemy, which you got by grabbing up the best planets in the early game.
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Jan 21, 2017 09:23
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Yeah, the "cost" of armies is in clicks. It costs less clicks to just build more troops than to try to improve them with attachments. Military in the game isn't a fight between fleets or armies, it's a fight between the number of clicks to manage your military and build up a warscore. The AI knows this and will do everything it can not to win, but to force you to click more and delay things in the hopes that you just peace out early or quit the game.
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Jan 21, 2017 22:20
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:My problem is that the ground game is utterly and completely irrelevant. There's no strategy surrounding troops; a player with a strong army is going to lose every war against a player with a strong fleet. The best way to defeat a strong army is to take them out before they even reach the planet, and the only reason armies are vulnerable in space is because you can't make starships that have troop capacity. IMO it's the worst part of what is otherwise a genuinely amazing game. Yeah, army management and ground combat and the warscore/peace system are the 2 things that really stick that are outright bad and not working. Everything else is pretty good, could have more content or be fleshed out more of course, but those two things are outright bad and make me not want to play.
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Jan 21, 2017 22:29
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It's not just a patch 1.5 is part of the next major DLC/expansion and they haven't even given it a name yet and barely dug into the whole "paid features" part of it. It also sounds like the last DLC was not nearly as code-heavy as this one, which will most likely address a lot more mechanical flaws and or add in whole new mechanics vs more of a content/balance dlc like leviathans. So might be a while.
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Jan 22, 2017 21:54
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I want massive mega cities, I want planets unable to support life because they've become a single giant polluted hive world and have to import tons of supplies to stay alive. I want everything from a glittering Coruscant or Trantor to a grim 40k hive world depending on how badly I hosed up my planet and population management.
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Jan 23, 2017 04:23
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Missiles are trash. Also I'm intensely curious about orbitals.
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Jan 23, 2017 19:12
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Wiz posted:The army system is basically guaranteed a rework. I really, really don't like the pointless micro. Yeah I'd love to see more poo poo like that. Make it a bio-weapon and it's use make you both hated and feared. Also a chance of the whole situation getting away from you. Also tell me about all the orbitals plz
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Jan 23, 2017 19:39
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Wiz thank you for making this game gooder.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:34
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Stellaris is set in your classic trek/wars style science-fantasy setting where artificial gravity is no thang so colonies can just be big space buildings with a single "up"
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Jan 23, 2017 22:22
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I always imagined it less as removing the thing and more laying the more expensive engineering and infrastructure to mass develop cities and such there, to learn to adapt to them. So you're not removing the mountains, you're just investing in swiss-levels of mountain infrastructure to make use of them.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:26
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Wiz posted:Yeah, I'm honestly not sure exactly how removing an active volcano is supposed to work. Would love to see some of the blockers or terrains tied into bonuses. Clear that toxic jungle and find a food bonus under it, "clear" the volcano and have it converted into a juicy geothermal energy bonus. "clear" the dangerous predators (by putting them into huge enclosures and poo poo) and get a bio/sociology bonus.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:32
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I didn't mind it in moo2. It wasn't that interesting but it was simple. Slap some transports in your fleet and your troops are automatically what ever your best tech is. In the early game they were a bit pricy so you'd often have the meaningful choice of bombardment invasion. Bombard them too much and you might destroy the colony and the valuable pops and buildings, don't bombard them enough and your attacking troops might fail. Sometimes you'd win, but not leave enough troops behind and they'd rebel successfully. You never had to babysit transports or do any micro, it was just a ship type you added to your fleet to support invasions. moo1 did it in a rather brutal total war sort of way. There were no troops, you simply armed millions and millions of your citizens and sent them off in transports. There was no occupation, only total genocide. You had to transport enough over to the enemy to wipe out their entire population. Once again this gave you the actual meaningful choice of bombardment vs invasion. Invade and you get all the juicy factories, bombard and you need fewer troops. Your own population is being lost in invasions too, so too many costly invasions could see half the population in your empire dead in a meaningless war. Vicky did this to an extent, with units tied to pops. In a space war game war really should be a bloody thing, with entire pops being converted into troops and sent off to die. A huge multi-planet ground war should have the ability to seriously kill off a lot of your and the enemy's population.
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Jan 23, 2017 23:15
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I think wiz has a handle on why armies in their current form are bad and correctly wants to re-do that system, so no need to convince him. I'd love to hear some of his ideas, for that, for pops/planets, and for warscore/peace/diplomacy changes too. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 00:00
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Stellaris human ladies always look like they're really sick of your poo poo.
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Jan 24, 2017 07:34
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Yeah the problem is that you never really know what your neighbours have, and your ships really need to be ready for anything. So the only logical choice, unless you absolutely know 100% that you're only going to be fighting a specific fallen empire next or something, is to make fairly generalized ships that do ok against everything. So all my ships tend to be the same game after game because the micro needed to constantly refit your fleet for every enemy is insane, and if you screw up you're at a huge disadvantage. Tons of micro, tons of risk, little reward.
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Jan 24, 2017 19:22
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We really do need some basic military intel system. Some points to throw at/invest in other countries to unlock greater info on them. See their demographics, see their budgets and planets, see their ship designs, research goals and so on. \/ Right but you don't get a page displaying "known designs" or something. You have to like take notes manually, that's not so fun. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 19:33
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I'd love it if each planet was more like a tiny civ map. A bunch of terrain types all with their own bonuses and traits and poo poo, and you'd build things on top of those. But have each tile actually represent some sort of specific feature or zone on the planet, not just generic "empty land" with maybe a bonus. Have hills, plains, jungles, forests, deserts, tundra, permafrost. Have the whole thing more like a civ city map and you improve the tiles. Have multiple buildings that do similar things but on different terrain. Build kelp farms on the ocean tile for food vs a farm on grasslands. Stuff like that. So if you know your planets have a lot of ocean, you'll want to jump on those level 3 kelp farms before you bother with the level 3 hydroponic farms. And in the same way, treat the population more like a civ city. Workers working the tile improvements vs specialists working inside the cities, and the ability to have more pops than tiles. Have planetary level improvements that open up slots for specialists. Build that huge planetary university that gives +10% science production plus has 2 scientist specialist slots. Stuff like that.
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Jan 24, 2017 21:46
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I wonder what "unity production" is. Something to do with the new ethics system?
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Jan 25, 2017 17:06
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Just one more sleep until the orbital diary.
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Jan 25, 2017 18:16
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Ah, so colonies just function as little planets with mines re-named mining drones or something.
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Jan 25, 2017 19:18
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Ainsley McTree posted:MoO also had "more taxes = less happiness" so I feel like that's not really evidence of a right wing galciv conspiracy either... There's taxes and happiness in moo?? Also yeah, Galciv has a ton of very right wing economic and social ideas baked in, it's just not hit you over the head obvious. But in any game where you're trying to model economies and societies is going to end up showing some sort of creator bias.
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Jan 25, 2017 20:26
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Ainsley McTree posted:Well moo2 anyway. Didn't it work so that the higher your taxes were, the more protesting pops you'd have? Nope, no tax related happiness stuff in moo. It wasn't so much a tax rate as just a production rate converted into money. You could build "trade goods" or what ever which directly converted production into "BC" or you could set a "tax" rate that converted a percentage of your production into income. It had no social or economic effects.
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Jan 25, 2017 21:03
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My fav personal bias leaking into a game is victoria 2, specially because the ideological leakage ended up making the economy not function at all and the only way around it was via some sort of command economy like state capitalism or full out communism.
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Jan 25, 2017 21:10
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I imagine they're treated exactly like a planet for most things.
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Jan 25, 2017 22:39
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I would pay real DLC dollars for a graphics pack of just more humans. Militarist humans, religious humans, space hippies, happy utopia humans. Basically give me a human clothing pack and I'll buy it, specially if it's some how tied into the ethos system. So my break-away xenophobic militarist empire dress like fascists and it's easier to know who to punch in the face.
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Jan 25, 2017 22:48
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oddium posted:i would pay for less humans PM me your bank details and I'll tell you how to set up a galaxy without any humans or even random sols!
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Jan 25, 2017 22:51
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GlyphGryph posted:Have you installed any/all of the additional clothing mods? They're all just like 18th century uniforms that look super out of place despite being really well done.
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Jan 25, 2017 23:03
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I liked playing xenophobe because it made my empire feel pure, it's like pretty borders for demographics. The monument to purity is nice too. I can't remember all the specifics, but the last time I played I was xenophobe and I liked it a lot. Bigger borders is nice too. Never enslaved nobody neither though.
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Jan 26, 2017 03:31
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I'm sad orbitals work only on planets rather than asteroids, and that they have a mineral penalty. If anything planets should be poor at mining, terrestrial mining and access to useful ores are insanely worse than mining asteroids. I was so hoping it was something more like an upgrade to mining/research stations. Find a nice +2 mineral deposit on an asteroid. Upgrade it to a small habitat that can fit 4 pops, now those 4 pops can produce on 4 +2 mineral tiles, or space mines in general have double the production. Keep upgrading as you get better orbital tech and eventually have it size 12 or 16 or what ever. A question though, if you build an orbital over something you can also possibly terraform like mars, what happens if you want to later terraform?
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Jan 26, 2017 16:31
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:How do you increase your energy credits cap? I unlocked Gaia World Terrsforming but it costs more credits than I can actually save. Do you have the two terraforming resources? They're pretty key to not insane terraforming costs.
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Jan 26, 2017 18:29
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I don't think I've ever set up a single trade in the whole game, other than the odd one-time mineral trade, but now enclaves have replaced that. Really wish there was more diplomatic interaction in that respect. Something like moo trade treaties. Both sides agree to a "mineral treaty" or something. It starts off costing -10 minerals a month but goes up every month, and then starts turning a profit. Eventually both sides are making 5% of the smallest side's mineral production a month. They are profitable long term investments that makes countries really think twice about hostile acts and build trust.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:28
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Civ's AI was never good but it was serviceable because the combat was simple, it eventually figured out doom stacks, and city management isn't that hard. But with 5 they added way too much poo poo they AI couldn't understand, and in 6 the AI is also pretty useless. I'm a big fan of games being designed not just to be fun for the player, but for the AI to also be able to play properly too.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:24
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Wiz posted:Nah, I have a decent bit of insight here and AI simply isn't a priority for most strategy game developers. There are many reasons for this, a big one is that there's simply not a good knowledge base in the industry about how to make strategy game AI. There's tons of people with experience coding FPS bot AI and they tend to be hired to make strategy game AI, but making a bot AI and a strategy game AI are completely different disciplines. There's other issues, like the fact that game developers don't play their own games, but I'm completely honest when I say that players being utterly dreadful when it comes to feedback about AI is no small factor. From the perspective of people who make the decisions, you basically always get the same amount of 'the AI is completely braindead and broken' because people will say this and only this no matter how large or small the issue they encounter is. Like you'll hear it just as much over AI literally ceasing to take any actions as you will over the AI, say, picking something that gives it 5 resources instead of 6. It's utterly toxic and completely discourages companies from giving a poo poo about AI. How can we as players give better feedback on paradox game AI ? I'm really glad you guys give a poo poo.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:38
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The combat AI in civ is so inexcusable because I've played some old groggy hex based wargames where the AI is ridiculously good. Like there's a human player who is making very good guesses at what my plan is and taking very good measures to counter it, or seeing the trap I've laid and avoiding it. The AI in Star Sector is also pretty amazing too, but that's not a strategy game (yet)
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Jan 26, 2017 22:46
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14 |
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The expectations for an AI in a paradox game isn't one that's good at winning, but one that's good at seeming like it's an actual human king or what ever trying to run their country with their own personal goals and motives. A human player knowing they're playing a game as the god-spirit ruler of a nation state may refuse annexation or vassalization, but an actual in-game king or duke or what ever may not. Paradox game AI's don't just have to be "good at the game" but they also have to make convincing NPC's role playing the leaders of countries or who ever. Then you also have people who will flip out and get mad over an AI doing something not historical.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:21
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